WND EXCLUSIVE

Revolt over gender-bending bathrooms

'Churches collecting signatures have never done anything like this'

Bob Unruh joined WND in 2006 after nearly three decades with the Associated Press, as well as several Upper Midwest newspapers, where he covered everything from legislative battles and sports to tornadoes and homicidal survivalists. He is also a photographer whose scenic work has been used commercially.

The numbers haven’t been tabulated – largely because petitions are arriving so fast and they aren’t due for a couple of weeks yet – but organizers of an effort to overturn California’s infamous school-bathroom law say the opposition to the plan is surging.

“We’re having a great response,” said Karen England, one of the principals behind Privacy For All Students, an initiative to overturn a law adopted by majority Democrats in the state legislature that essentially allows public school students to choose their gender. Opponents of the law need about 500,000 petition signatures.

“I am amazed at the churches that are out there collecting signatures [that] have never done anything like this before,” she told WND.

The churches not only are collecting petition signatures, but there are messages from the pulpits about the dangers of the new law.

She reported receiving a call from an 82-year-old great-grandmother who was out on the streets collecting signatures.

“They (lawmakers) absolutely have awakened the sleeping populace,” England said. “I am hearing every day from churches who never before have been involved.”

She said the supporters for the ballot issue that would overturn the state law don’t have to persuade anyone. They just need to give them the facts.

As WND reported, some parents were so stunned by the law that they checked online rumor sites, such as Snopes, according England.

The campaign’s goal is to veto the “extremist” language adopted by majority Democrats in the state legislature and signed by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown that opens public school locker rooms and restrooms to students of either sex.

Apparently, students will only need to tell school officials which gender they feel like. England affirmed that the law has no provision for certifying that someone is gender-disoriented or gender-confused before being given the rights provided in the new law.

“We’re not like Las Vegas. What happens in California spreads to other states,” she said.

The law, AB 1266, adopted during this year’s legislative session, provides that students be given access to gender-segregated facilities according to their “gender identity.” It’s the latest in a long list of sex indoctrination laws adopted in California, including one that requires a day of recognition for Harvey Milk, the homosexual politician who also was an advocate of infamous cult leader Jim Jones.

England told WND the law is a direct assault on parental rights, because it allows schools to treat their children as members of either gender and send them to locker rooms or restrooms that may be in conflict with their physical gender and keep all such information away from parents.

“This is as far as they’ve (lawmakers) ever gone. This is the most extreme. Parents and teachers are absolutely outraged,” she said.

“Not one lawmaker campaigned on allowing boys in the girls locker room and restrooms,” she said. “Nor is there one who, I think, will, or will be able to stand and explain why they think this is a good idea.”

Attorney Tim LeFever, who also is working with the initiative effort, wondered how many people would think it’s “too extreme to have sex-segregated bathrooms.”

“On this one, the general public doesn’t have a problem saying boys in the girls locker room isn’t a good idea,” he said.

He said telling a 16-year-old boy struggling with gender identity issues to use the girl’s restroom defies logic.

“I think that shows a real lack of compassion. One needs to deal with such an individual in a way that does not humiliate,” he said.

“We respect that some students are struggling with their own sexual identity, but we ask for respect for the other students who will be humiliated when a boy walks into the girl’s locker room,” said England. “This is a privacy issue, a safety issue, and a common sense issue.”

She said it seems “unbelievable that this bill would ever have made its way through the legislature and signed into law by the governor.”

The law, the first of its kind in the nation, drew the wrath of state Assemblyman Tim Donnelly.

Allowing teenage boys and girls in the same locker room, showering side by side, is a bad idea. In fact, AB 1266 is a recipe for disaster. This will take the normal hormonal battles raging inside every teenager and pour gasoline onto those simmering coals. The right to privacy enjoyed by every student will be replaced by the right to be ogled.

While trying to address a concern of less than 2 percent of the population, California is now forcibly violating the rights of the other 98 percent. Many of the parents I have heard from within the last few days have literally pulled their kids out of public schools and have enrolled them in homeschool and private school programs. My boys, who went back to the public school after many years away, will not be returning.

It is completely unreasonable to expect teenagers, who are uncomfortable with themselves at this age, to accept this level of privacy invasion. After all, in the Capitol building, not only do they not allow men in the women’s bathroom, the women must enter a code to access their restrooms.

California lawmakers have built a long reputation for promoting “gay” rights and resisting attempts to uphold traditional values in public schools and elsewhere. Majority Democrats on a California state legislative committee at one point killed a plan that would have cracked down on intimate relationships between school teachers and their students.

The unsuccessful Assembly Bill 1861 would have made it a felony if any teacher or employee of a public or private school “engages in a sexual relationship or inappropriate communications with a pupil.”

Another bill, SB48, requires positive portrayals of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons in public school social studies and history classes.

Others state laws:

SB 543, signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2010, “allows school staff to remove children ages 12 and up from government schools and taken off-campus for counseling sessions, without parental permission or involvement. The purpose is to permit pro-homosexuality teachers and administrators to remove sexually confused children in 6th grade and up from campus and take them to pro-homosexuality counselors who will encourage them to embrace the homosexual lifestyle.”

ACR 82, approved by the California Legislature in 2010, “creates de facto ‘morality-free zones’ at participating schools (pre-kindergarten through public universities). Schools that become official ‘Discrimination-Free Zones’ will ‘enact procedures’ (including mandatory counseling) against students from pre-kindergarten on up who are accused of ‘hate,’ ‘intolerance,’ or ‘discrimination’.” What is the hate? Peacefully speaking or writing against the unnatural lifestyles choices of homosexuality and bisexuality.

SB 572, signed by Schwarzenegger in 2009, establishes “Harvey Milk Day” in K-12 California public schools and community colleges. In classrooms, schools and school districts that participate, children will now be taught to admire the life and values of late homosexual activist and teen predator Harvey Milk of San Francisco the month of May.

SB 777, signed by Schwarzenegger in 2007, prohibits all public school instruction and every school activity from “promoting a discriminatory bias” against (effectively requiring positive depictions of) transsexuality, bisexuality and homosexuality to schoolchildren as young as five years old. SB 777 means children will be taught their “gender” is a matter of choice.

AB 394, signed by Schwarzenegger in 2007, effectively promotes transsexual, bisexual and homosexual indoctrination of students, parents and teachers via “anti-harassment” and “anti-discrimination” materials, to be publicized in classrooms and assemblies, posted on walls, incorporated into curricula on school websites, and distributed in handouts to take home.

SB 71, signed by Gov. Gray Davis in 2003 and implemented in 2008 through the new “sexual health” standards approved by appointees of Schwarzenegger and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell, teaches children as young as 5th grade that any consensual sexual behavior is “safe” as long as you “protect” yourself with a condom, and teaches children that homosexuality, bisexuality and transsexuality is “normal.”

AB 1785, signed by Davis in 2000, required the California State Board of Education to alter the state curriculum frameworks to include and require “human relations education” for children in K-12 public schools, with the aim of “fostering an appreciation of the diversity of California’s population and discouraging the development of discriminatory attitudes and practices,” according to the state legislative counsel’s digest.

AB 537, signed by Davis in 1999, permits teachers and students to openly proclaim and display their homosexuality, bisexuality or transsexuality, even permitting cross-dressing teachers, school employees and student on campus, in classrooms, and in restrooms.

The state legislature even demanded that students in public schools every year honor Harvey Milk, a homosexual activist, reported sexual predator and advocate for Jim Jones, leader of the massacred hundreds in Jonestown, Guyana.

SaveCalifornia.com contends that in honoring Milk, schools are advocating for the acceptance of what Milk sought: the entire homosexual, bisexual and cross-dressing agenda; a refusal to acknowledge sexually transmitted diseases spread by the behavior; his behavior as “a sexual predator of teenage boys, most of them runaways with drug problems”; advocacy for multiple sexual relationships at one time; and “lying to get ahead.”

A 1982 biography of Milk tells of a 16-year-old named McKinley who “was looking for some kind of father figure.”

“At 33, Milk was launching a new life, though he could hardly have imagined the unlikely direction toward which his new lover would pull him,” the book says.

“It would be to boyish-looking men in their late teens and early 20s that Milk would be attracted for the rest of his life.”